Apache Cassandra
Ranked 5 of 9 distributed databases by recommenders
Open-source distributed database people recommend for write-heavy workloads and high availability at scale. Common caveat: it is hard to operate, with repair, backup and data-safety pitfalls.
Open-source distributed database people recommend for write-heavy workloads and high availability at scale. Common caveat: it is hard to operate, with repair, backup and data-safety pitfalls.
27 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 12
- criticize it
- 15
- approval share
- 44%
Recommended in 8 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 12 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 0.8 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 8 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Strong cost and availability at scale
“Cassandra at scale has a demonstrably better cost and availability slo than literally annything else”
Comment from 22 Aug 2026 in “The road to ACID transactions in Cassandra 6” “Twitter would have been way better off using Cassandra”
Comment from 25 Mar 2026 in “Today's Layoffs” Fits write-heavy and AP workloads
“Write-heavy applications still may benefit from something like Cassandra”
Comment from 23 Dec 2025 in “Instant database clones with PostgreSQL 18” “something like Cassandra for the objects (AP)”
Comment from 20 Aug 2026 in “Git at Any Scale” Specialized database for specific use cases
“There's still lots of room for specialization tuned database options like Cassandra, Scylla, etc.”
Comment from 27 Apr 2026 in “Branimir Lambov from IBM on Cassandra” “excellent db's meant for very specific use cases”
Comment from 27 Apr 2026 in “Branimir Lambov from IBM on Cassandra”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Heavy operational burden to manage
“It's an operational nightmare, and I will not miss it even the slightest bit if it goes away forever.”
Comment from 21 Aug 2026 in “The road to ACID transactions in Cassandra 6” “the joys of the 'repair' cronjob, backups, and commitlogs only occasionally not corrupting”
Comment from 22 Aug 2026 in “The road to ACID transactions in Cassandra 6” “Draining a broken Cassandra ring and under high load is hell and ball clenching.”
Comment from 13 Mar 2026 in “"Design Me a Highly Resilient Database"” - Comment from 24 Mar 2026 in “Today's Layoffs”
- Comment from 9 Jun 2026 in “Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers”
- Comment from 30 May 2026 in “SQLite is all you need for durable workflows”
Data loss and backup risks
“the absolute horror of foot guns, backup nightmares, data loss scenarios with seemingly safe choices around quorum”
Comment from 21 Aug 2026 in “The road to ACID transactions in Cassandra 6” “the joys of the 'repair' cronjob, backups, and commitlogs only occasionally not corrupting”
Comment from 22 Aug 2026 in “The road to ACID transactions in Cassandra 6” Weak ACID and systems-of-record fit
“It would certainly be a boon if Cassandra did better ACID”
Comment from 27 Apr 2026 in “Branimir Lambov from IBM on Cassandra” “Cassandra is no kind of answer for systems of record”
Comment from 13 Mar 2026 in “"Design Me a Highly Resilient Database"” Failed in production at Twitter
“it was Twitter who spent a massive effort trying to make it work in production. And failed.”
Comment from 25 Mar 2026 in “Today's Layoffs” “Using off-the-shelf solutions like Cassandra didn't work”
Comment from 24 Mar 2026 in “Today's Layoffs”
Other distributed databases people recommend
The four most recommended other distributed databases, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FoundationDB | 26 | 6 | 81% | 9 | — | Approved |
| Google Cloud Spanner | 23 | 2 | 92% | 9 | — | Approved |
| CockroachDB | 19 | 11 | 63% | 11 | — | — |
| rqlite | 13 | 4 | 76% | 5 | — | Approved |
| Apache CassandraThis page | 12 | 15 | 44% | 8 | — | — |
What people said
30 of the 33 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Cassandra at scale has a demonstrably better cost and availability slo than literally annything else”
“I'll take those over the pain of cassandra gladly.”
“the joys of the 'repair' cronjob, backups, and commitlogs only occasionally not corrupting”
“the absolute horror of foot guns, backup nightmares, data loss scenarios with seemingly safe choices around quorum”
“I would not recommend starting new projects with it either”
“when it finally clicked it really clicked for me”
“It's an operational nightmare, and I will not miss it even the slightest bit if it goes away forever.”
“something like Cassandra for the objects (AP)”
“There were many problems with Cassandra that I won't go into”
“major OSS projects have all/most important data structures and algorithms implemented and described way better”
“go into a resource-constrained death-spiral on stuff that should be async / non-blocking and safe”
“they build world class software that backs massive systems like elastic search, Kafka, spark, or Cassandra”
“Every time we reached some limit or huge optimization burdens that were unfeasible.”
“you're stuck managing a Cassandra database”
“Cassandra isn't fun to manage.”
“so you're into cassandra.”
“It would certainly be a boon if Cassandra did better ACID”
“There's still lots of room for specialization tuned database options like Cassandra, Scylla, etc.”
“excellent db's meant for very specific use cases”
“the data is sharded in a circle with redundancy metrics”
“it was Twitter who spent a massive effort trying to make it work in production. And failed.”
“Twitter would have been way better off using Cassandra”
“Using off-the-shelf solutions like Cassandra didn't work”
“dedicated possibly hundreds of engineers to make Cassandra work”
“Draining a broken Cassandra ring and under high load is hell and ball clenching.”
“Cassandra is no kind of answer for systems of record”
“readahead value less than chunk size makes cassandra slow in general”
“Cassandra is was full of all these tasks limped into the same problematic single jfm heap”
“Write-heavy applications still may benefit from something like Cassandra”
“consider looking at Cassandra/ScyllaDB or CockroachDB as alternatives that might be a better fit”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.